Abstract
When does police violence induce race riots, and when does police violence lead to community protest and nonviolent social action? Cathy Lisa Schneider answers these questions through a comparative analysis in Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York. Schneider’s central argument is that race riots occur when communities are unable to channel their discontent into alternative forms of social action in response to the violent policing of historically rooted racial boundaries. Through the analysis of police violence in two different countries, across multiple decades, Schneider shows that the social factors producing riots are not culturally or institutionally specific. Although Schneider’s book comes at a time when there is a renewed public interest in police violence in the United States and France, Schneider’s book reminds us that there is nothing new about this current political moment regarding police violence and race.
In the first part of the book, Schneider builds a deep historical thread that connects to present-day activation of racial boundaries in New York and Paris. New York’s racial boundaries intensified with the migration of African Americans and Puerto Ricans to the urban north in the 1920s. In Paris, racial boundaries stemmed from the French colonization of North Africa, migration of Algerians to France, segregation in the isolated Parisian banlieues, and the withholding of French citizenship from Black migrants. The first two chapters of the book, while fast paced, are effective in situating broad structural disadvantage in localized contexts with local actors, and they emphasize the role of police in maintaining the racial boundaries that have been constructed in both Paris and New York.
In the second part of the book, Schneider examines why riots have become a rare event in New York and uses contemporary events to explain why Paris has recently been susceptible to riots. This section also incorporates interview data with law enforcement, families of police violence victims, banlieue residents, and community organizers. Schneider argues that there has been a major shift in the way that New Yorkers in communities affected by police violence respond to police homicide as they have moved from rioting to collective and civic action (p. 136). In chapter 3, Schneider details seven cases of New York police homicide from 1994 to 2007. Through these examples, Schneider shows that racial minorities in the United States have seen increased access to the legal system and have also successfully launched civil legal suits against New York police officers. However, most of the families wanted greater social change regarding policies against police violence, and some of the families even used a portion of their settlement money to fund anti-police violence community organizations (p. 173).
Returning to the Paris case, Schneider introduces a 2005 incident where two young boys were fatally electrocuted by a transformer while attempting to evade the police. Rather than call the power company, the officers left the boys to die. The banlieues rioted for 3 weeks following the deaths, and politicians’ denial that police had done anything wrong served to anger the community. National differences in rioting are partially explained by the French conflation of race and citizenship. Blacks in Paris are ‘others’ in terms of not only their racial category but also their status as noncitizen foreign nationals – even those born in France (p. 201). Thus, Black noncitizens in Paris lack access to the legal apparatus that Black citizens utilized in New York. To develop this point further, Schneider establishes Marseille as a contrast to Paris to show how the racial boundaries in the two cities differ. In Marseille, minority groups and their religious viewpoints are welcomed and integrated, there is a close economic and geographic proximity between ethnic groups, peaceful policing strategies are practiced, and the local mafia integrates minority groups through its business ventures (p. 222). During the Paris 2005 riots, Marseille stayed relatively peaceful due to the absence of a strict us/them racial boundary.
One of our critiques of the second half of the book regards the unevenness of the comparative cases. It is unclear how to contextualize the seven cases of New York police homicide presented in the book within the broader period of police violence in the state. Then for Paris, Schneider relies heavily on an example of youth killed by police inaction with few specifics of additional events. This particularly disparate presentation of events left us with a sense that police violence is dramatically different in these two contexts – one being more fatal, frequent, and intentional. Perhaps these two global cities are not ideal comparisons as initially established in the first part of the book. In fact, Schneider’s reliance on additional urban comparisons of New York to Los Angeles and Paris to Marseille further enhances our point about difference (pp. 82–84, 238).
A second critique regards Schneider’s interviews with police officers and the subsequent lack of analysis of those interviews. Schneider interviews White, Black, and Puerto Rican New York police officers to locate racial boundaries within the New York Police Department, but the interview excerpts are not thoroughly analyzed, critiqued, or triangulated. For example, is it true, as one officer claimed, that ‘many black undercover police officers are shot by other police officers’ (p. 150)? These interview data also fail to engage with policing literature that has shown that, at least in the United States, while there are differences in attitudes and beliefs between White and minority officers, there are strong similarities in policing behavior by race (see, for example, Brown and Frank, 2006; Sun and Payne, 2004). The interviews with minority police officers in Paris were not surprising as these officers’ perceptions mirror findings in policing organizational culture research in the United States (see, for example, Moskos, 2008).
One noticeable drawback of Police Power and Race Riots is that the book was published pre-Ferguson. As American readers, we want to know how Schneider makes sense of the recent race riots following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, which occurred after a 30-year period of relatively few riots in the United States. Similarly, in 2017, France experienced violent riots as a result of the alleged rape of a 22-year-old Black man by the police. Dubbed the ‘Théo Affair’, this incident caused riots in Paris as well as Marseille. Both of these events would most certainly have been a major aspect of Schneider’s work had they occurred before the book was published. We encourage readers to supplement this book with Schneider’s more recent publications that discuss and contextualize the Ferguson riots and include interviews with people close to Michael Brown (see Schneider, 2015, 2017). A second edition of Police Power and Race Riots with new afterword commentary would certainly be a worthwhile contribution to the understanding of police violence and urban unrest.
Overall, Schneider successfully incorporates ethnographic and interview methods into a comparative historical study. The author’s interviews give voice to those directly involved in communities affected by police violence. Schneider also contributes to the existing literature on police conduct by showing how police officers are embedded in a historical project of racial boundary maintenance, even when located in dissimilar geographic and cultural contexts. Furthermore, international comparative studies of race riots are not common, and, thus, this book represents a much needed addition to a field of study that lacks quality, and methodologically ambitious, research. Police Power and Race Riots provides a compelling argument as to why race riots do and do not occur in response to police violence. This book would be a meaningful addition to history, political science, sociology, or criminology courses that focus on social movements, state violence, policing, and/or racial inequality. Overall, Schneider provides readers with an understanding of police violence that can potentially be applied to other countries, thus allowing future researchers to answer questions that are not bound to the United States.